On the Security of Wireless Sensor Networks through Trust Management Factor (TMF)

Abstract

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained a remarkable appreciation in several aspects of our daily lives. In most of the scenarios, the WSNs are expected to operate in an independent manner which exposes the senor nodes to several attacks. The standard secure strategies like authentication and cryptography are not suitable due to the limited resources of sensor nodes. Hence this paper proposed a simple and effective trust sensing mechanism, called as Trust Management Factor Routing (TMFR) for WSNs. TMRF integrates two trusts namely Communication Trust and Energy Trust thereby the network achieves a higher Quality of Service with more security. According to TMFR, the nodes trustworthiness is measured first and based on the obtained value of TMF, the node is declared either malicious or normal. The communication trust is modeled as direct and indirect communication trust. The energy trust is modeled with respect to the residual energy thereby the node which has sufficient energy is only chosen. This is a generalized trust model and validated through different attacks and at every attack, the performance is measured through Average Packet Delivery Ratio (APDR) and Average End-to-End Delay (AEED).